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Globally, more than 70% of the freshwater withdrawn from Earth’s surface or from underground is used to irrigate agricultural crops. Satellites reveal that extracting water doesn’t just affect the local environment – there are, in fact, knock-on consequences for many aspects of the Earth system. The latest findings, based on research carried out through ESA’s Science for Society Irrigation+ project and published in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment offer a comprehensive description of the complex interplay between irrigation and the global environment.
The image on the left shows irrigated areas in India where the spatial extent has been extracted from the enhanced global irrigated areas dataset that covers 1999–2012, processed by Meier, J et al. (2018). The image on the right is a landcover map of the same region and is from the Land Cover 100 m global 2019 epoch map from the Copernicus Land Cover Service.
Read full story: Satellites unveil the far-reaching impact of irrigation